In an emerging world of IT, changes are often and almost always expected. The creation of applications, across all platforms, has become so vital to the presence of any business, to the extent that a business may not survive without an IT factor.

Formation of applications varies in usage, but their importance remains consistent regardless of the industry.

The problems that businesses continue to face have a lot to do with IT departments’ struggle to keep up with the pace of changing demand in the business environment, especially in industries such as retail, where the lack of pace is affecting retailers ability to become innovative, or telecoms that must evolve at unprecedented pace due to consumer demand.

It is very important for businesses to remain relevant in a consumer-drive world, and as this consumer-driven world becomes increasingly more technology-centric, business’ IT departments have to change the way they operate.

Most business processes are supported by applications and therefore both play a fundamental role in the customer experience. Nowadays, customer resilience to poor experiences when dealing with companies is highly reduced, and companies who fail to understand this and fail to provide a great customer experience will simply disappear from the market in years to come. And they must disappear for the sake of human evolution.

Hence, applications are of the core competencies in making businesses more relevant to consumers, their employees and their clients. Because of all the constraints that businesses face, it is important that IT departments need to move towards more adaptive software development systems that can be easily changed (and quickly) to meet consumer — and business — needs.

It is mainly because of this that traditional hand-coded application development platforms are no longer the most efficient way to develop applications. Traditional coding methods take a very, very long time to write, an even longer time to check for mistakes; where mistakes will only become apparent at the time that the code is launched or — even worst — at the time the customer dials the call centre or walks into one of the company branches.

Furthermore, many IT projects hit some glitches in the process of working on new projects, due to the coding problems they face. Some of these problems include:

• A coder can’t capture the true requirements when trying to automate a manual process, because no one actually knows the current process

• The current process is filled with logical holes and gaps that workers make assumptions about during their day-to-day work, which makes it impossible to write a complete spec

• End users and stakeholders do not have a concrete idea of what they truly want or need

Due to this fact, businesses are under great pressure to investigate approaches and platforms in order to make the application development environment more productive. Instead of outdated, traditional methods that not only take months and months to complete, but cannot make adapt to the requirements of consumer and business needs.

Outmanoeuvre the competition

That is where an adaptive platform needs to come in. Ideally, such platforms need to help businesses deliver great web and mobile applications, and need to help them achieve complex integration by creating highly flexible and adaptive environments. Such a platform should be able to effectively outmanoeuvre the competition by taking a different approach to application development. This includes helping IT departments automate where they can and seeking out more intelligent and effective ways to develop applications.

Rather than traditional coding methods, a platform needs to enable business owners to have full control on their processes, from design to rollout, but most important full control on continuously changing these processes and fine-tuning them with real feedback from the field. For this, business owners need a platform that can adapt fast to their requirements.

A great example is a supermarket retailer in the Netherlands known for its excellent customer service, which used a platform to build an application that made stock information from the website and from the shop system available to employees on the shop floor.

Accurate stock intelligence now helps guide shelving decisions and enables employees to respond quickly to customer requests. Employees also have visibility into future order information so they can let customers know when stock will be back in the stores. As a result, new levels of customer service and loyalty have been achieved.

Employing a more strategic approach to development, such as the platform used by the supermarket in the Netherlands, should help business owners better manage their application stack and development requests.

This means that through a new, more efficient way of developing applications, we should expect to see more improved segmentation and prioritisation of their application portfolio so that they are better equipped to deal with the speed of change.

There’s no doubt that adaptive systems speed innovation. Top business-owners will no longer rely on yesterday’s tools and approaches to solve today’s business challenges. Instead, they should begin to search for more agile development systems that enable them to control every aspect of the application at any given moment, in order to increase productivity and to enable their business to develop into a faster innovative age.

The writer is the director of Middle East & Africa at OutSystems.